by Feed your head with a play by Pamela Olson

Created on: March 07, 2009   Last Updated: March 08, 2009

Embracing Bad Boy Wines. The more people want Parkerized wine, the more there is room for unique. Because it takes a bad boy wine to age into a magnificent wine.

Today, too many wines taste too darn alike. And to me, that taste is the rough equivalent of sodas, which I have never liked. I have never willingly drank a California Chardonnay because where's the taste of the interesting earth and climate it came from?

Healthy grapes are a medium to channel healthy soil mineralogy and weather. Their roots have a lot to say to the fruit. As in love, connection and communication is everything.

Wild and rambunctious wines are like bad boys. Drinking these wines is like kissing someone I'm in love with. The tease of their classic scent, then the unforgettable lingering taste and I'm lost in over the top hormonal love followed by the short nap. Ah for a Barolo taste of rose petals, suedelike tanning, gravel, tar and tea, or a Dard de Ribo and Rioja I think.

Or a St.-Josephs, which are the undeniable bad of the bad boys of the Rhone River in Tournon. The body language of bad boys is to embrace, slash, lunge, tap, shove, thrust, and hover. So also do bad boy wines. Bad boys can grow up to be magnificent men. Bad boy wine can age into a magnificent wine.

Importers Kermit Lynch, New York's Neal Rosenthal, New York's Louis/Dressner and Burgandy's Becky Wasserman have bad boy wines with seductive terroir. New York's Joe Dressner has a pedigree to match his taste in bad boy terroir wine. Joe was once a Marxist, a radical activist and married a French girl he met at NYU's School of Journalism.

It seems to me that the spectrum of wine tastes available has narrowed. Too many wines now have no distinguishing qualities and have no sense of place. Wines with uniqueness and place were and are what I like. Now too many wines are boring fruit and oak. The Tuscan wines even started tasting like the California wines.

I began to wonder what had happened to the wines that were a reflection of their soil and climate. What happened to wine's integrity? Then people began to show up wine tastings wearing perfume and cologne, which is infuriating as well as confounding. Scents interfere with aroma, don't they know?

I discovered that wines had become spoofulated, tampered with, although in pc language it's known as processing. Their flavor was manipulated. More like emasculated. No more naturally made, native yeast, biodynamics, organic, or old barrels. Instead it's proudly hailed Designer Yeasts!

Yeast

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